Batman Ninja Trailer: The First-Ever Dark Knight Anime Has Arrived

6 months ago

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Forget Ben Affleck and all of that Justice League talk, the trailer for Batman Ninja is here and it may cure all of your current Batman blues. The trailer, released Friday, features a new unique take on The Dark Knight and other DC Comics characters from Gotham City in Japan as Batman and his team of Nightwing, Robin, Alfred, and others fight for a way to return home. In addition, Joker, Penguin, Catwoman, and Harley Quinn all make appearances in the officially Warner Bros.-backed movie. The project was first announced at New York Comic-Con in October and fans have been anxiously waiting for their first look at Batman Ninja.

Clocking in at two minutes, the Batman Ninja trailer starts off by reading, “A New Batman Story” where we see Batman and his arch nemesis, the Joker, preparing for a battle in a chaotic era Japan. Explosions, guns, meditation, and some seemingly newly introduced samurai warriors front the trailer that shows just a little bit of the action we’re in store for. The animation style is a cool blend of the Batman animated series and anime designs, which looks pretty awesome. The trailer is shown with subtitles and it is not clear at this time if the movie will be released in English when it comes to Blu-ray and DVD early next year.

Takashi Okazaki, who previously designed characters for Afro Samurai, was the character designer on this feature-length cartoon, and he did a pretty awesome job reimagining the classic Batman characters like the Joker, Catwoman, Nightwing, and Robin into the mixed-up, original reinterpretations on display in the trailer. Batman Ninja is directed by Junpei Mizusaki (Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure Manga) and written by Kazuki Nakashima (Kill La Kill), with the English script being written by Eric Garcia and Leo Chu. The movie will be out sometime in 2018 in the United States with a release in Japan in January.

Batman Ninja is a collaborative project between Warner Bros. Japan and Warner Bros. Entertainment, and at the time of the initial announcement, it was stressed that the feature would be examining Batman as a character through a Japanese cultural lens, not just showing Batman having a strange time traveling Japanese adventure. The trailer certainly looks unique with a firm foot in the familiar and it will surely be something that fans of Batman and anime will be able to dive into headfirst. It certainly beats watching Ben Affleck play with his Batman action figure and complaining about how heavy his suit was.

The trailer for Batman Ninja is an exciting tease into a new reimagining of Batman that looks promising. It will be interesting to see how it stacks up next to Batman: Gotham by Gaslight, which is also a reimagining and set to be released next year as well. In other Batman news, it looks like Jake Gyllenhaal could be the next actor to portray the Dark Knight in Matt Reeves’ The Batman, which has seen its fair share of turbulence over the last year. Never mind that though, check out the brand-new trailer for Batman Ninja below, courtesy of Warner Bros. Japan’s YouTube account.